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MOSCOW, June 28 (RIA Novosti) – Ever heard about the curse of the pharaohs? Well, how about the curse of a 2,500-year-old chief of a nomadic Scythian tribe that brings about floods, droughts, livestock decimation and high atmospheric pressure?

Though the curse of the pharaohs has repeatedly been debunked as myth, the Scythian curse is very real, say locals in a remote area of eastern Kazakhstan where the chieftain’s remains were discovered – and where they will be reinterred this weekend to appease his spirit, to the chagrin of archeologists.

In 2003, an archeological expedition dug up a burial mound in the Shiliktinskaya Valley to find a Golden Man – a presumed leader of the Saka tribe, a branch of the Scythian nomads that populated Central Asia and southern Siberia in the 1st millennium BC.

The pagan Saka fought the ancient Persians and Indians, and grew rich through trading across the great steppes of Central Asia. Some of their wealth ended up in the tombs of their chieftains, who were buried wearing jewelry and gold-plated armor – like the man in the Shiliktinskaya mound, the third such find in Kazakhstan since 1970.

But not all Golden Men are equally lucky. While one found in 1970 went on to become Kazakhstan’s unofficial symbol, the chieftain from the Shiliktinskaya Valley has been blamed for climate change and other problems.

Since the mound was excavated, the area around it has been hit by several floods, a drought, a mass loss of livestock and an increase in births of children with learning disabilities, locals said, Kazakh television KTK reported.

“[Since the excavation], we have had snowfall and storms in winter. The weather has turned upside down ecologically. We have got [high atmospheric] pressure now,” local woman Aiduriya Kumpisova told KTK.

“The elders blame it on the excavation,” agreed Aidyn Egubayev, who has spent five years campaigning for the reburial of the Golden Man, Tengrinews.kz said Friday.

Scholars dismissed the rumors, pointing to global climate change as the reason for the area’s problems, KTK said.

But archeologists had to concede to reinter the Golden Man at the request of the Kazakh Culture Ministry and after “unrest” among locals, the channel said. He will be returned to the mound on Sunday.

This is not the first time Kazakhstan has given in to the demands of the supernatural: Last year, residents in the town of Karabulak sacrificed a white camel to stop a “suicide epidemic” allegedly instigated by the devil.

Russia’s republic of Altai campaigned for two decades for the return of the Siberian Ice Maiden (also known as the Altai Princess), a 2,500-year-old mummy found in Siberia in 1993. Locals claimed the removal of the mummy had brought various calamities upon the republic, and managed to have the Siberian Ice Maiden returned to a local museum, though not her burial mound.

Saturday, 29 June 2013

A ground-breaking archaeological discovery in Cambodia has revealed a colossal 700-year old urban landscape connecting ancient cities and temples to Angkor Wat. Lara Dunston joins the excavation team for the first site visit by a British newspaper

Pre Rup temple at Angkor, Cambodia. Photograph: Terence Carter. Click on the magnifying glass icon to see a larger version of this image

It's 7am at Angkor Wat and there's not a tourist in sight. It's blissfully quiet, the first clear June morning after two days of torrential rains. The only souls around are a small group of Buddhist pilgrims, lighting incense at the rear of the spectacular Khmer temple. The bleary-eyed early-risers, who woke in darkness to board tour buses to Angkor archaeological park for sunrise photo ops, have already trundled back to their breakfast buffets.

The releasethis month by the US National Academy of Sciences of a report on the results of a high-tech survey of Khmer Empire sites, undertaken in April 2012, has rocked the archaeological world and captured travellers' imaginations.

A monumental, sophisticated, densely populated urban landscape, which dates back more than 700 years, has been identified. It includes and connects Angkor cities such as Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom and Bayon, with the rarely visited medieval city ruins of Phnom Kulen, Beng Mealea and Koh Ker, over 100km away.

Evans was one of the report authors and the lead archaeologist and director of the project, which only became known outside local and archaeological circles with the release of the report this month.

As we make our way through dense vegetation, he explains how eight key archaeological groups, including the Cambodian government's Apsara Authority, which manages archaeological sites, collaborated on the project. It began with the survey using an airborne laser scanning instrument called Lidar, strapped to a helicopter, to search for ruins and other structures (the size of the area covered by the helicopter doing the survey was 320 sq km). Developed in the 1990s, it's only recently that the technology has matured to the level where it can penetrate dense vegetation and provide extremely detailed models of the forest floor.

"For archaeologists, these lumps and bumps that we see in the forest, each has a meaning," Evans explains, pointing out gentle mounds. "These are all the traces of the civilisation of the city associated with Angkor Wat, made of wood and thatch, that has disappeared. It's these contours that remain inscribed into the forest landscape we study."

Smoke wafts from the fires lit to keep mosquitoes at bay. Dotted between the mounds are several rectangular holes in the ground where Dr Miriam Stark from the University of Hawaii and her team are at work.

"We're really interested in understanding residence patterns, where and how people lived and who they were," Stark explains excitedly, showing me X-ray-like images of the area we're in. "Before, it took more than three intensive weeks of [preparation] before we knew where to dig. Now, with Lidar, it's as if you just peel a layer off and it's there!" With clipboards and pens in hand, the team records a wealth of discoveries, such as shards of Ming Dynasty ceramics.

Ta Prohm Temple, Siem Reap. Photograph: Terence Cartere

Scholars have based their idea of all medieval cities around the world on European cities, explains Professor Roland Fletcher, director of the Greater Angkor Project. But now, it seems there was a colossal low-density urban sprawl here, a conurbation of different places with massive working citadels with enormous infrastructure. Remote temples cities like Koh Ker, 120km from Siem Reap, and Beng Mealea, 52km away, once thought of as isolated, would have been large outlying service centres for Angkor within a huge hinterland.

"This is a highly managed system, the most extensive pre-industrial city in the world,"he says, though referring to its complexity rather than its size. "The Lidar results show there were three cities [here] at the end of the 9th century – the largest was on top of Mount Kulen, creating an [equivalent to] industrial 19th-century Britain."

The city is so enormous it is unlikely to ever exist as one excavated site, but tourism here is likely to increase. There's talk of a cutting-edge museum presenting the exciting new discoveries, new archaeological sites in the future, and greater interest in little-visited outlying temples already accessible to the public.

We decide to head to one of these Phnom Kulen, a site rarely visited by tourists, with just a few companies offering expeditions and treks there.

"Phnom Kulen is a sacred mountain, a holy place for Cambodians," Tat, our guide from Backyard Travel tells us en route. His ancestors called this place Mahendraparvata, or the Mountain of Indra, King of the Gods. "We call it the Mountain of the Lychees now. Look, you can see it here," he says, pointing to a long, low, flat plateau that barely rises above the palms, banana plants and rubber trees that skirt the road and hug the traditional stilted timber houses dotting the lush emerald-green countryside.

Phnom Kulen may not be the dramatic mist-shrouded peak I imagined, yet the 492m-high, 8km-wide and 32km-long mountain is visible for the whole 90-minute drive north from Siem Reap to the foothills of Mount Kulen national park. We intend to hike to the summit, and the remains of the three-tiered temple of Prasat Rong Chen that marks the site where the Khmer Empire was founded in AD 802, when a Brahmin priest declared Jayavarman II universal monarch – just two years after Charlemagne was made Holy Roman Emperor – will be nothing less than dramatic.

Mahendraparvata was never really "lost" – the mountain has long been known as the location of the sandstone quarries that built Angkor's cities, as well as the source of water for a complex system that irrigated the vast empire. When we visit, people are wading in the River of A Thousand Lingas, a section of the stream boasting stone carvings on its floor. Villagers frequently stumble across finds, recently some bronze, copper and sandstone statues of Hindu gods Vishnu, Shiva and Lakshmi. But the Lidar survey confirmed that Mahendraparvata was part of a city, and much larger than suspected – maybeas big as present-day Phnom Penh.

We leave our air-conditioned four-wheel drive behind and soon we're bouncing along muddy tracks on the back of motorbikes behind guides familiar with the landmine-riddled mountainside, that was the last stronghold of the Khmer Rouge.

Workers on a dig at Angkor Wat. Photograph: Terence Carter

They lead us towards the summit. It's a slow journey, over narrow, bumpy dirt trails – only the most intrepid travellers come here. We cross log bridges and ride straight through flowing streams. Scattered across the mountain are ruined, foliage-covered temples, ancient highway markers and, at Sras Damrei or Elephant Pond, massive statues of an elephant and lions. The thought that more sites like this could soon be discovered is thrilling.

Back in Siem Reap we take to the air in a helicopter to get a better idea of what this urban landscape might have looked like. Had I taken the flight two weeks' ago, I would have gasped at the magnificence of the isolated temple structures with their imposing walls and moats surrounded by forests. Now, I see patterns of bumps and lines on the vast floodplain as beautiful remnants of an immense, effervescent city that technology and archaeology are finally bringing to life.

While many believe this site will become one of Asia's greatest wonders, and tourism bodies are eager to see excavations progress quickly and more archaeological sites opened up to visitors, the extraordinary size of the area means work will be costly and take years. In the meantime, however, the intrepid can play at being Indiana Jones at undeveloped sites on Phnom Kulen, and temple cities such as Beng Mealea and Koh Ker – and let their imaginations run wild.

Thursday, 4 July 2013 – Saturday, 6 July 2013, Berlin

This conference sits squarely at the crossroads of many important contemporary conversations, both scholarly and popular. Over the past decade, scholars have examined the reception of the ancient Greek and Roman cultures around the globe. This has been done by analyzing the role of ancient Mediterranean culture in a variety of cultural instances; for example post-antique texts and images, ideology and institutions, as well as rituals and practices. The research has been wide-ranging, including examinations, for instance, of Greek tragedy in 20th-century African theatre and Latin poetry in colonial Mexico. Still there has not yet been a project dedicated solely to the reception of Greece and Rome in East Asia, despite tantalizing clues concerning the wealth of material available for investigation: from the Isopo Monogatari (伊曾保物語), a 16th-century Japanese edition of Aesop’s Fables, to a theatrical season in Beijing in July 2012 directed by the famed Li Liuyi that included both Sophocles’ Antigone (安提戈涅) and the Tibetan epic King Gesar (格萨尔王).

This conference will explore the reception(s) of Greek and Roman culture in East Asia from antiquity to the present. That is, the conference seeks to explore the movement and transmission of knowledge between Western antiquity and East Asia as well as the circulation of this knowledge within East Asia. In particular, we are interested in the question of how and why ancient Greek and Roman texts, images, and material cultures and the knowledge and ideas contained within them have been adapted and refigured in East Asian texts, imagery, and cultural artefacts.

The ever-growing complexity of the relationship (economically, politically, and culturally) between East Asia and the “West” makes the study of the reception of Greco-Roman antiquity in East Asian cultures particularly relevant and timely, and most importantly not just a matter of academic interest. Since “Western” culture’s self-conception begins in Europe with ancient Greece and ancient Rome, the reception of ancient Greco-Roman cultures in East Asia provides an excellent point of reference for current intercultural and interdisciplinary dialogues in an increasingly globalizing world, particularly since the present era might be understood as a period characterized by an increase in the frequency, speed, and prevalence at which knowledge transfers between various points and people around the globe. This conference aims to explore this point of reference by bringing together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars and practitioners (performing artists, writers, visual artists, and those working in theaters and museums) to analyze the many diverse aspects of the reception of Greek and Roman culture in East Asia.

On this webpage, you will find a wide variety of information relating to the conference, but if you still have questions, please feel free to contact us at:greeceandromeinasia@gmail.com

Preliminary Program

4 July 2013

13.00 Registration

13.30-15.00I Opening Session

13.30 Introduction: Almut-Barbara Renger (Freie Universitaet Berlin)

13.45 Bernhard Kytzler (University of KwaZulu-Natal): Teaching Classics in China in the Late Twentieth CenturyFritz-Heiner Mutschler (Peking University): Western Classics at Chinese Universities: A Few Subjective Observations

14.30 Discussion

15.00-17.15 Plenary Session

II Classical Scholarship and Translation

15.00 Zhi Zhang (Peking University): Lukianos in China

15.30 Lihua Zhang (Peking University): The Vernacular Chinese as a Style: A Study on Zhou Zuore’s Modern Translation of Theocritus’ Idyll X

16.00 Xin Fan (Freie Universitaet Berlin): Imagining Classical Antiquity as a Global Concept?: The Debate on the Periodization in the Ancient World in Twentieth-Century China

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Hans van Roon

About Me

My fascination for these subjects started in the '80 's by reading the book of Peter Hopkirk about the travels and explorations of Aurel Stein in Central Asia at the beginning of the 20th century.
Over the Silk Road through Central Asia, the Taklamakan Desert, Bokhara and Samarkand I arrived in the 13th century and followed the building of a world empire by Genghis Khan, his sons and grandsons.
His most famous grand son was Khubilai Khan and with him I ended in the Yuan Dynasty in the time when Marco Polo visited China and since than I never stopped reading again

Bibliotheca Sinica 2.0

Bibliotheca Sinica 2.0 explores Sino-Western encounters with a guide to digitized books on China published between 1477 and 1939

Yale Silk Road Database

The Yale Silk Road Database serves as a multi-disciplinary resource with relevance to students and faculty working in the fields of art and archaeology, religious studies, history, East Asian languages and literatures, Central Asian and Islamic studies.

International Dunhuang Project

IDP is a ground-breaking international collaboration to make information and images of all manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang and archaeological sites of the Eastern Silk Road freely available on the Internet